Identity and Ideology in the School Boardroom
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About the talk:
School boards have statutory authority over most elementary and secondary education
policies, but receive little attention compared to other actors in education systems.
A fundamental challenge to understanding the importance of boards is the absence of
data on the policy goals of board members—i.e., their ideologies—forcing researchers
to conduct tests based on demographic and professional characteristics—i.e., identities—with
which ideology is presumed to correlate. This paper uses new data on the viewpoints
and policy actions of school board members, coupled with a regression discontinuity
design that generates quasi-random variation in board composition, to establish two
results. The first is that the priorities of board members have large causal effects
across many domains. For example, the effect of electing an equity-focused board member
on test scores for low-income students is roughly equivalent to assigning every such
student a teacher who is 0.3 to 0.4 SDs higher in the distribution of teacher value-added.
The second is that observing policy priorities is crucial. Identity turns out to be
a poor proxy for ideology, with limited governance effects that are fully explained
by differences in policy priorities. Our findings challenge the belief that school
boards are unimportant, showing that who serves on the board and what they prioritize
can have far-reaching consequences for students.
About the speaker:
The speaker, Barbara Biasi, is an assistant professor of economics at the Yale School
of Management and a faculty research fellow at NBER. Other authors are Minseon Park
of University of Michigan, John Singleton of University of Rochester and NBER, and
Seth Zimmerman of Yale School of Management and NBER. Access the paper at https://www.barbarabiasi.com/uploads/1/0/1/2/101280322/bpsz-school-boards-2025-12-11.pdf.
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